LA trial witness links defendant to victim's truck

Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter in his trial at the L.A. Criminal Court. He is charged with killing a San Marino man and suspected in the disapparance of the man's wife in 1985.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A notorious Rockefeller impostor on trial for murder was linked by a key witness Tuesday to a truck bought by the man he is charged with killing in California more than a quarter-century ago.

Christopher Bishop, who became an Episcopal priest, testified that in the 1980s he met a man who called himself Christopher Crowe. Bishop was a film school student and was told by his father, a priest, that there was a new young man in their Greenwich, Conn., community who was a filmmaker. He introduced them and they became friends.

Bishop said Crowe talked of producing films and TV and one day he offered to give him a truck he said had been used on a production shoot. He said he didn't need it anymore and suggested Bishop contact California to get license plates. But when he did, he said, he was told there was a lien on the vehicle for $6,000.

"I got a bright idea to buy a cheaper model of the same truck, take the plates off and register it. I was a poor film student then," the witness said sheepishly. He said he drove the truck around with fake plates and then abandoned it at a train station. He never saw it again, and it has never been found.

Bishop acknowledged lying about the saga when he was first questioned by police who told him the interview was part of a missing persons investigation.

"I lied," he said. "I said I knew nothing about a truck. I was pretty panicked.... This was a person I trusted."

He added, "It was not my finest hour."

Bishop said the next time he talked to Crowe he told him a detective had been inquiring about him, and angrily asked, "Who the (expletive) are you?"

"He said, 'I gotta go,' and that's the last I saw of Chris until this case," the witness said.

Pressed by defense attorney Brad Bailey on why he changed his story, he said, "When I found out the dimensions of this case and that there might have been a murder, I felt it was my duty to tell what I knew."

Other witnesses have said victim John Sohus and his wife, Linda, bought the truck just before they vanished in 1985. At the time they lived in a suburban San Marino home owned by John Sohus' mother and defendant Christian Gerhartsreiter — using the name Christopher Chichester — occupied a guest cottage. Gerhartsreiter is charged with killing John Sohus. Linda Sohus has never been found.

Before being charged in California, Gehartsreiter had used the name Clark Rockefeller to move through East Coast social circles. In 2009, he was convicted in Boston of kidnapping his daughter and sentenced to prison.

Los Angeles prosecutors are close to wrapping up their case and were expected to call Gerhartsreiter's ex-wife as their final witness.

The cold case mainly rests on circumstantial evidence, the strange behavior of the defendant and the grim discovery of a bag of bones.

About a decade after John Sohus' mother died and Sohus, his wife and the Chichester persona had all disappeared, the new home owner was digging up the yard for a swimming pool.

While there is no DNA to link the bones to the defendant, the plastic bag they were found in bore the logo of a Midwest university Gerhartsreiter once attended.

Defense attorneys claim that victim John Sohus was not killed by their client but by his wife, Linda, who vanished at the same time he did.

There has been no evidence of a motive for either Gerhartsreiter or Linda Sohus to kill John Sohus.